Radiohead's Kid A

by Lin, Marvin

  Perhaps this is why the RIAA, clearly new kids on the digital block, attempted to extinguish the downloading onslaught with ridiculous propaganda and a whole lotta litigation, forcing down peer-to-peer sites and suing grandmas and kids because, well, it didn’t know what else to do. It was essentially employing outdated tactics to try to quell a revolution that had not been systematically rationalized, if only because this revolution was symbolic in nature, operating outside the dictates of the top-down, vertically aligned power structures to which the industry was accustomed. Even the industry’s later attempts to fight technology with technology ended with embarrassing outcomes (cf. the Sony BMG rootkit scandal and Digital Rights Management). The industry was floundering aimlessly, showing how its fingers were ultimately in our pockets rather than on the pulse of the vibrant MP3 revolution.

  The decade played out like cat and mouse between the industry and the “pirates,” with the digital music revolution decentralizing so quickly that the industry didn’t know who to sue anymore. As soon as it thought it had nipped Napster in the bud, peer-to-peer sites like Gnutella, Freenet, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Morpheus, and Audiogalaxy caught on like wildfire. Then came the BitTorrent protocol, with services like Supernova, isoHunt, TorrentSpy, and the infamous The Pirate Bay, which further decentralized networks to the point where there were multiple clients (μTorrent, Azureus) with multiple trackers (SceneTorrents, OiNK) and multiple indexing sites (isoHunt, Mininova). The Pirate Bay soon became Napster’s successor as the poster child for illegal file-sharing and, after a raid in 2006 and convictions in 2009, was forced to shut down its tracker. The Pirate Bay fought back by obscuring responsibility even further by maintaining its services with “magnet links,” the next evolution in the technology, which in effect undermined the necessity of trackers while still pointing users to the whereabouts of illegal content.

  While the industry has since made tentative steps to embrace digital music — licensing music to online companies, promoting digitally, streaming music, etc. — it’s still hedging its bets on the use of power to control the digital music revolution. In fact, the industry is now desiring to curtail piracy by working with internet service providers (ISPs) to explore the possibilities of protocol blocking, bandwidth throttling (limiting transfer speeds), and even disconnection through what’s been called graduated response (also known as “three strikes”). The implication here is that ISPs would have not only the right but also the obligation to monitor internet activity, raising serious doubts about the digital future’s protection of privacy and due process. (Graduated response has already been implemented in several countries, though not without resistance.)

  For all of the industry’s rhetoric about fighting on behalf of the artist, it became clear that, throughout this whole fiasco, no money was being distributed to its “clients.” By the end of the decade, some of the world’s largest music acts showed little faith in the major music industry to promote and sell their music. Madonna, Prince, The Eagles, Nine Inch Nails, Joni Mitchell, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Paul McCartney would all join Radiohead in leveraging their cultural cache to move forward without major label support.

  * * *

  McLuhan might’ve seen the industry’s litigations as a print-culture mentality meeting an electronic-culture reality. The MP3 was propagating itself organically, but the industry’s initial hesitancy to seriously engage with digital music has shown why their slow-drag into the digital recycle bin isn’t surprising: it didn’t adapt.

  The implication of new technology is that templates of yore will eventually be de-emphasized, become obsolete, or be replaced. For the music world, this meant just about the entire industry — traditional record labels, pressing plants, retail stores, distribution, promotion, radio stations. Gone are the days of Big Artists and Big Albums; gone are the days of big box music stores competing with local independent shops; gone are the days when major music groups can maintain the dominance they achieved during the heyday of physical music-selling. In their place came MP3 blogs, YouTube, iTunes, subscription models, pirating software, and MySpace streams; everything became niche because the internet fostered more outlets for technological innovation and more audiences to test them out. The industry was suddenly faced with the reality that the material logic of the commodity ceased to hold its relevance in a digital economy, while artists who quickly embraced the technology, like Radiohead, would flourish.

  Here, Kid A becomes not just “an album” but also an experience of different media, marked most dramatically by the multiple versions that pervaded the collections of millions of fans. I’ve experienced this shift firsthand through my own copies of Kid A. Ten years ago, the primary medium I used to listen to Kid A was the compact disc: I had the regular CD version for my dorm and the children’s book version for my car; at one point, I transferred the CD to minidisc for outside strolls, and a few years later I purchased the vinyl version. But for the majority of this decade, I’ve listened to Kid A on MP3. Early MP3 versions were attained (illegally) through file-sharing software — first Napster, then Soulseek — while the MP3s I currently listen to were downloaded (illegally) from a private BitTorrent tracker. Over the years, I’ve had MP3s of the album spread across several drives at various encodings, including 128 kbps, 160 kbps, 192 kbps, 320 kbps, and variable bit rate. I even downloaded a FLAC version just in case and a shitty 8 kbps version just for kicks. This year, I streamed Kid A for the first time.

  This ease in digital reproduction gives credence to Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility”: Kid A was designed to be reproduced, transmitted, and reproduced again. In fact, that it could be both reproduced and transmitted outside the demands of the major label industry is the most convincing reason why the MP3 ruptured the industry in a way that artistic movements (free jazz, hip-hop, noise) could only approximate: the technological resources and intellectual know-how were there to mobilize it from the bottom up. But the exchange of MP3s throughout the internet was also remarkably different in nature than the shelving of CDs in a music store. With the MP3, music stopped functioning like a “sign” that could be bought and sold like a commodity; it was instead placed on the level of what Jean Baudrillard called “symbolic exchange.” While a sign adheres to capitalism, symbolic exchange functions more like a gift, undercutting the very heart of free-market ideology. The symbolic exchange of the MP3, then, would ultimately serve to undermine an industry that ultimately had no gift to give in return.

  Not that this shift to a digital medium was without precedent. In fact, it’s argued that, since the early twentieth century, virtually all music became electronic music. Whether or not the music is composed of “electronic instruments” is immaterial to the fact that most performed sound is nonetheless electrically amplified. The importance of this sound conversion — from analog to digital, acoustic sound to electric signal — can’t be overstated: not only did the switch dislodge music from the performance space (e.g. the concert hall) but also it precipitated a rush of technology aiming to distribute music to every nook and cranny in the world. This was an early sign that the recording industry was building a house on sand: once music became subsumed into an electronic economy, an infrastructure based on physical material could only incite interest through scarcity (limited-edition releases), packaging (box sets, album artwork), and ideology (support artists, capitalism = good).

  Free from the limitations of physical formats — indeed, a spatial concern — the MP3 could now rearticulate music’s temporal relationship with the medium, exposing music’s previous dependence on time restrictions. This relationship is most noticeable on an aesthetic level: throughout the history of recorded music, musicians have largely played to the medium, creating songs/albums/collections with direct awareness of the medium’s length requirements — 3 minutes for 78s, 45 minutes for the vinyl LP, 74 or 80 minutes for the CD — there were even attempts to augment these restrictions by exp
erimenting with two sides of a slab of vinyl or creating multiple-disc CD changers. The digital medium, however, introduces an open-ended format that demarcates a shift from the isolated single or album to a continuous, neverending playlist, where listening becomes increasingly personalized, interactive, and patterned. It’s a temporal freedom that has threatened the endurance of the album tradition: the beginnings and endings of albums — irrelevant to the continuous flow of a playlist — are being de-emphasized, while “bonus” and “hidden” tracks (like the one on Kid A) already feel like relics from a distant past.

  Things are quickly changing elsewhere, too. With physical collections (CDs, LPs, etc.) migrating to hard drives, advancements in space and increased downloading speeds have produced a mentality of boundless accumulation, where our tastes are publicly displayed through social-networking tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm rather than shelved in the privacy of our homes. Sound quality is sacrificed for portability and accessibility (a 128 kbps MP3 eliminates roughly 90 percent of the information found on a CD, which itself is already compressed), while consumption becomes increasingly dependent on a continually expanding network of hard drives, operating systems, processors, software, ISPs, speakers, and portable music players. For many people, downloading has already outpaced their ability to listen to all of it, which may perhaps be seen as an idiosyncratic stockpiling phase before data transfer fully replaces physical transaction. We’re not far off from our music collections departing completely from our hard drives, where music will stream from the so-called “cloud,” in which taste will act like filters on a boundless database of music that’s stored on nameless servers and accessed remotely (Google and Apple are quickly working to debut their own cloud-based services). Here, music will be about access, not ownership, with our consumption practices expressed through faster speeds, shorter durations, and a new technological rhythm.

  Indeed, if these new technologies are telling us anything it’s that time, not space, has dominated our recent interactions with media. As McLuhan put it, “For tribal man, space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man, it is time that occupies the same role.” Simply observing the pace set by new media points to a swift temporal transition into a faster, more dynamic way of experiencing new sounds, facilitating new connections, and making new discoveries. From hype cycles and internet memes to real-time search results and instant messaging, our perception of time has contracted considerably, with the duration between action and reaction so compressed that our sense of scale has dramatically changed while electronic culture’s virtues of multiplicity, pluralism, and interrelation come into even sharper relief. Whether all of this is good or bad isn’t my concern here; there’ll always be fans who will play a heavyweight vinyl version of Kid A through their hi-fi stereo and cradle the artwork in their arms, regardless of any technological advancements. But there’s no question that these new technologies have attuned our perceptions to a quickened cultural pace that renders previous patterns of consumption inappropriate for younger generations of music fans.

  And here, at last, we can revisit the stakes of the new technological rhythm: “Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies.” Taking McLuhan’s advice, those of us looking for change would be advised to adopt a perceptual sensitivity to our media rather than a conceptual mastering of our culture. If we had done so in 2000, we might’ve perceived how Radiohead’s embrace of Napster was also a wider embrace of digital freedom; if we do so today, we might be able to ensure access to this freedom remains a central right in the future.

  Kid Ascension

  Let us leave theories there and return to here’s hear.

  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  One of life’s prime motivating factors is the awareness of our mortality: the more we ruminate on our impending death, the more motivated we are to do something about it. Consequently, time is treated like a commodity, something that holds value due to its limited availability. This is why, in addition to having and spending time, we can feel like we’ve lost or are losing time, why we’re finicky about where our time is invested. It’s also why I’ve spent the last two chapters discussing Radiohead’s relationship with the future. If our conception of time as a limited commodity forces us to worry about what will happen next, then we encourage ourselves to make the “most” of our time, to do something worth doing. But is music listening something worth doing?

  For the majority of the last decade, I attempted to make music seem more “important” by grounding it in social and cultural contexts. Taking cues from critical theorists (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin) and surrounding myself with a multi-faceted bunch of so-called “new musicologists” (Susan McClary, Nicholas Cook), I was able to situate music within contexts that involved more than “just music,” linking it directly to identity politics, cultural anthropology, postcolonial studies, sexuality, social theory, media theory, etc. It was an interdisciplinary approach that enabled me to sleep better at night under the belief that contextualizing music was in fact something “worth doing.” At one point, I was even getting more satisfaction reading and writing about music than the act of listening itself. Whether through the lens of traditional or new musicology, I could pontificate until my jaw ached, and I didn’t even have to hear a single note.

  Indeed, music, for better or for worse, had become an intellectual pursuit rather than a sensory experience, and my first target of analysis was the sensory experience that had once been my ultimate goal in music listening: transcendence.

  * * *

  I was most open to transcendent experiences as a teenager. This is when I found being “swept away” by music at its most invigorating, when ascendancy into timelessness was couched in sweet harmonies and hypnotic rhythms. It was in these rare moments when the temporal boundaries that structure our lives — from breakfast time to nap time, work time to play time — were removed. Similar to how drugs can skew our perception of time, music could create the sense that schedules were irrelevant, that time itself could be transcended altogether.

  It’s funny how such intense, overwhelming feelings can be so easily destroyed through academic endeavors. Part of adopting a critical perspective means divorcing yourself from the object in question and becoming more aware of your emotional reactions; that is, to see through the “spell” of music, one needs to be educated about its effects. The more I examined and deconstructed music’s constituent elements — rhythm, melody, harmony, tonal color, formal structure — the more I understood how they can be arranged to, in a sense, “manipulate” the listener. Indeed, what happens when you find out that there’s nothing inherent in the minor chord that makes it sound “sad”? What happens when you discover that tracing rock’s rhythms back in time will bring you through the slave trade and back to Africa? What happens when you notice that McDonald’s is suddenly using hip-hop to sell its burgers?

  What happens is your conception of music changes: its “history” becomes entrenched in politics, while music itself seems to break down into transparent aesthetic tricks, in which the meaning assigned to harmony is arbitrary; in which tension-and-release is employed to create a false sense of narrative; in which continually delaying our gratification mirrors the goal-oriented rhetoric of capitalism, of religion, where that carrot perpetually dangles just beyond reach. Work hard, get rich; lead a devout life, rise to heaven; give in to Western music’s conventions, and you’ll get your hook, your money’s worth, your sanctified musical experience. If Western music works under the same teleological principles as capitalism and religion, its desire to string us through time is also a way to convince us that time itself is a linear concern, with a beginning, middle, and end. And if time is an expendable commodity, I reasoned that trying to “transcend” time was a waste of time.

  The feeling of transcendence, then, seemed like nothing more
than an illusion, a result of artistic manipulation and cultural conditioning. I rationalized that my relationship with Kid A had been superficial, that my emotional reactions were like Pavlovian responses expected from someone who had been duped into believing in the mystical power of music. Better to formulate Important Ideas about music’s socio-political worth than to, you know, bother with actually listening to it. If all music can, indeed, be interpreted politically, the desire to transcend seemed like an escapist retreat, a way to forget about the wars in the Middle East or the homeless people outside my window, a way to render myself politically useless for selfish, hedonistic pleasure. This all made me wonder even more intensely: in a time of social, political, cultural, environmental, and economic unrest, is music listening even important? Is music listening where I should be spending my time?

  Thom thought so, and not just because our listening pays his bills.

  * * *

  In a 2004 issue of The Third Way (a British Christian magazine), an interviewer asks Thom to elaborate on a previous statement he had made about escapism: “You once said that the most important thing about music is the sense of escape it gives us. Our shallow popular culture seems to be all about escapism, but is that what we really need?” Not one to shy away from his passion for music, Thom replies:

  “Escapism” isn’t really the right word. I think that all the best music … Well, for example, just off the top of my head, one of my absolute favourite pieces of music ever is “Freeman Hardy and Willis Acid.” It’s an Aphex Twin instrumental which has this frantic hi-hat thing going all the way through it and then at some point everything switches tonally and it all goes out of phase and then carries on. And the first time I heard it, it was like someone had just reached over and switched a switch in my head and I never, ever saw anything the same again. I was completely straight. I was just driving along the road, driving home, whatever — and I had to stop the car.